The moment a child is born, a woman's life is forever changed, taking on new meaning. Motherhood can be an empowering -- and exhausting -- experience, unveiling knowledge, insights and previously untested strength and stamina.

Here's what grown children and mothers have said about motherhood, that unique and special experience.

"My first vivid memory is...when first I looked into her face and she looked into mine. That I do remember, and that exchanging looks I have carried with me all of my life. We recognized each other. I was her child and she was my mother." - Pearl S. Buck (writer)

"Oh what a power is motherhood, possessing a potent spell!" - Euripedes (ancient Greek playwright)

"She made me a security blanket when I was born. That faded green blanket lasted just long enough for me to realize that the security part came from her." - Alexander Crane (writer)

"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much!" - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (editor and wife of President John F. Kennedy)

"There shall never be another quite so tender, quite so kind as the patient little mother, nowhere on this earth you'll find her affection duplicated." - Paul C. Brownlow (writer)

"My mother sang with me in her stomach; I sang with Bobbi Kris in my stomach. I believe the child starts to develop within, and whatever you read, whatever you think, whatever you do affects the child." - Whitney Houston (singer and actress)

"The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes one a mother, which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician." - Sydney J. Harris (author and journalist)

"Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around on the outside of your body." - Elizabeth Stone (writer)

"Motherhood is like Albania - you can't trust the brochures, you have to go there." - Marni Jackson (journalist)

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